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FoodTech Weekly #184 by Daniel S. Ruben
News on FoodTech, food, and society
Daniel S. Ruben
February 16, 2024 • Estimated Reading Time: 15 minutes
FoodTech Weekly #184
Hi there,
Norrsken Accelerator (where I’m a mentor) is open for applications, but the number of female-founded teams that have applied is only 7,36%. Tell female founders of impact startups that you know to apply, or nominate them here (it takes 20 seconds).
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Arla Foods, a Swedish-Danish €14B dairy multinational, made fun of Oatly’s products just five years ago in big ad campaigns, referring to them as pjölk, trölk, brölk, and sölk (in Swedish, dairy milk is called mjölk).
Now Arla has launched its own range of oat-based drinks, with the brand (wait for it…) Jörd.
Finally, congrats to Stockeld Dreamery (where I used to work) for launching MELT — cultured cheddar slices. Stockeld’s CEO Sorosh Tavakoli has written a great post about this, and the third wave of plant-based cheese — check it out.
Stockeld Dreamery MELT
This week's rundown:
French Jow pulls in $13M to take its personalized meal planning and grocery shopping app to the U.S.
Controlled environment agriculture scaleup Hippo Harvest of San Francisco rakes in $21M Series B
Why dog poop rained over a Stockholm, Sweden neighborhood last week
Let's go!
Conversations
Spoke with Daniel and Oliver Rotko, brothers and co-founders of Arctic Farming in Finland, a couple of days ago.
Oliver has a traditional business background, focusing on B2B sales, marketing, and sustainability — and for the past 7+ years he’s been a YouTuber on education and early career development in Finland. At the end of Oliver’s Masters studies in late 2018 (on Entrepreneurship and Innovation Management at Aalto University) , they had to create a business and pitch it in front of a panel of experts. Oliver’s idea was around vertical indoor farming, and the experts advised him to move forward. This led to what became Arctic Farming, in late 2019 (‘perfect timing before COVID halted everything for us’, Oliver laughs).
Daniel is a biologist, always obsessed about plants, growing things like banana, papaya, citrus, and avocado trees — there’s a small jungle at home. ‘He tried to educate others back in the 90s about the values of composting and recycling before it was a thing’, Oliver says about his brother. Daniel is currently completing a Ph.D. in Ecotoxicology. He also holds a Master of Space Studies from the International Space University, and has been a strong advocate for the Finnish space industry for years (note to self: Finland and space makes me think of the 2012 cult movie Iron Sky).
The Rotko’s come from a family of entrepreneurs. Their dad worked in hospitality for 30+ years, and they kept hearing about the food supply chain issues (price, quality, seasonal availability etc) and issues around low margins. Arctic Farming was born to solve for this.
Oliver and Daniel explain: ‘A lot of the industrial-sized vertical indoor farms are big, cool, and produce high-quality products, but it’s still inherently more expensive than stuff grown in greenhouses. What incentive do consumers have to buy something at a higher price? Our idea was to have a business model to bring food products next to the end users, but also educate consumers, offering them a full sensory experience — seeing, smelling, touching the products while they were being produced.’
Arctic Farming has developed fridge-sized growing cabinets called Herby, that are placed in restaurants and hotel lobbies where consumers can see and engage with the produce. The cabinets are designed to be quick and easy to plant in, inspect, manage, and harvest from.
‘This isn’t saving the world. We’re super critical against the claims that the vertical farming industry is making, often based on just hype’, Oliver states and continues: ‘We’re growing specialized high value crops that are difficult to procure. In Finland we for example grow edible flowers like viola and cornflower, but also arctic wild herbs, basil, mint, and expensive and unique crops like Japanese wasabi.’
Restaurants and hotels lease the cabinets, and pay less than €240 for everything. So it makes it easy for restaurant managers to benchmark the costs of these plants grown on site vs. purchasing them on the market. Arctic Farming has been piloting for 1.5 years, and will start ship out commercial products in the early fall across Europe. The company also experiences a large interest from e.g. Japan, Singapore, and South Korea — and from the European space industry (to which the Arctic Farming team has deep connections):
‘We derive our driving philosophies from the space industry. Once you fire a satellite into space, it’s rather difficult and expensive to fix after the fact – just ask the team behind the Hubble telescope. We are using the same logic with Herby – we don’t want to rush to market just to find out that the product doesn’t work, so we’ve taken our time to make sure of our product-problem-fit and that the device can be used by the customer without us interfering’, Oliver points out.
Arctic Farming is raising a ‘small’ $2.5M Series A round, to take it to profitability. The company is also eager to engage with new potential customers, such as mid- to large-sized premium hotel chains. Arctic Farming also wants to chat with more potential manufacturing partners, and wants to add relevant people to its Advisory Board. Oliver and Daniel can be reached via LinkedIn, as well as email (Oliver here, Daniel here).
Arctic Farming
Noteworthy
Jow of Paris, France — an app for personalized meal planning and grocery shopping — has bagged $13M in extended Series A funding, led by Northzone and backed by Eurazeo. The company will now expand to the U.S.
Robot startups raised $749M in December, OttOmate reports, bringing the total funding for the vertical to $12.9B in 2023. In the food/ag space, e.g. Agtonomy raised $22.5M, Cyngn pulled in $5M, GreyOrange closed a $135M round, and Instock banked $3.2M.
Brazil-based Cellva Ingredients has clinched R$6.5M (appr. $1.3M) in funding; it’s the first startup in the nation to develop and produce cultivated animal ingredients, starting with pork fat. Seed4Science led the round, and it was joined by e.g. ProVeg Incubator, Rumbo Ventures, and EA Angels.
FreezeM of Israel has harvested a $14.2M Series A in a round led by the European Innovation Council Fund (EIC Fund), an undisclosed group of ‘industrial investors’, along with existing investors and partners. Founded in 2018, FreezeM breeds and supplies Black Soldier Fly neonates (eggs that have just become larvae) to insect farmers, that grow insects for e.g. pet food and animal feed.
Israeli AgTech startup SaliCrop has developed a non-GMO seed technology that it claims can transform arid terrain into flourishing landscapes to grow food. The tech boosts seeds’ resilience to abiotic stresses, which help the seed survive dry spells and intense heat. The company says abiotic stresses cause 30-50% of ag productivity losses worldwide, equal to $170B in lost revenue. SaliCrop’s seeds are used in e.g. in Spain.
Image: Guy Shery / SaliCrop
iYOTAH Solutions of Colorado, U.S. has scored a $2.8M Series A round from VC firm Innova Memphis. The company has developed a SaaS platform that aggregates disparate data for livestock producers and their stakeholders, and then provides business intelligence.
The FoodTech Lab of Spain launched its first fund, Climate Fund I, with a €30M target size. It will invest in seed to Series A in Europe and Israel, within AgTech, Health & Nutrition, Alt Proteins, Circular Economy, and Waste (h/t ClimateHack). And in Asia, Temasek has joined forces with Norinchukin to launch a $173M Green Agri Fund, focused on decarbonizing food and farming in the Asia-Pacific region.
Izote Biosciences of Berkeley, California has raised $2.6M to develop a oxygen-less fermentation process for synbio including cultivated meat. The round was led by Embark Ventures and EGB Capital.
A new £3.3M (appr. $4.1M) project at Aberystwyth University in the U.K. aims to eliminate dependence on nitrogen fertilizers in the U.K.
Controlled environment agriculture startup Hippo Harvest of San Francisco, California has scooped up a $21M Series B round backed by e.g. Energy Impact Partners, Amazon’s Climate Pledge Fund, and Congruent Ventures for its greenhouse-grown produce. The company has developed modular greenhouse system that use machine learning and AI to save precious inputs like energy, water, and fertilizer.
Hippo Harvest
Nordic FoodTech VC has started fundraising for its second fund, targeting €80M. It has also brought on Louise Heiberg, based in Denmark, as Investment Director (full disclosure: I’m an advisor to Nordic FoodTech VC).
The CEO of Novo Nordisk, the company behind diabetes/weight loss drugs Ozempic and Wegovy, says chief executives of food companies are calling him, as they’re scared about how these new efficient weight loss drugs might impact their sales of foods.
‘Is marbling the ‘Holy Grail’ for plant-based steak?’, Green Queen asks.
Preliminary AgFunder data shows a 76% decline in funding for cultivated meat, going from $807M in 2022 to just $177M in 2023.
News from the FoodTech Weekly community
LA VIE (France) are looking for a COO… Improvin’ (Sweden) are recruiting a Sustainability Solutions Manager… Revyve (The Netherlands) are hiring an Applications Technician.
Congrats to FoodTech Weekly subscriber Giacomo Cattaneo who has launched venture studio Food Founders, bringing together tech, talent, and capital to create a ‘palate-, planet-, and profit-friendly’ food ecosystem.
Want to share some FoodTech news/project with other FoodTech Weekly subscribers? Hit reply.
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Random Stuff
The richest five families in Florence, Italy from 1427 are still the richest today. And any family who was in the top third in 1427 is almost certain to still be there today.
Barcelona has declared a drought emergency, with fines up to €3K for ‘serious water offences’.
Crocheted food by Kate Jenkins:
An introduction to solarpunk farming.
A Guinness World Record has been awarded to a French man who built a model of the Eiffel Tower with 700,000 matchsticks:
Last week it rained dog poop on a neighborhood in Stockholm, Sweden. Over the years, lazy dog owners had secretly disposed of dog poop bags into a big metal pipe sticking deep into the ground (instead of the trash cans). Due to a controlled explosion for the current construction of a new subway line, the metal pipe acted as a cannon, shooting out scores of dog poop bags over cars, streets, and houses in the area. Says a local neighbor: ‘In the morning there was poop all over including in the trees. It was biblical, like with the Plagues of Egypt. Smoke came out of the pipe. If someone had walked in front of the pipe when this [explosion] happened, they could’ve died. A pretty undignified way to die.’
I love you.
Daniel
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This issue was produced while listening to Friends (feat. Bon Iver) by Francis and the Lights, and Bon Iver. Follow me on LinkedIn and Twitter. Did your brilliant friend forward this to you? Subscribe here.